Just a decade ago, most U.S. and European officials were dismissive about the durability of the emerging partnership between China and Russia. The thinking in Western capitals was that the Kremlin’s ostentatious rapprochement with China since 2014 was doomed to fail because ties between the two Eurasian giants would always be undercut by the growing power asymmetry in China’s favor, the lingering mistrust between the two neighbors over a number of historical disputes, and the cultural distance between the two societies and between their elites. No matter how hard Russian President Vladimir Putin might try to woo the Chinese leadership, the argument went, China would always value its ties to the United States and to U.S. allies over its symbolic relations with Russia, while Moscow would fear a rising Beijing and seek a counterbalance in the West.
Even as China and Russia have grown significantly closer, officials in Washington have remained dismissive. “They have a marriage of convenience,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told U.S. senators in March 2023 during Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s state visit to Moscow. “I am not sure if it is conviction. Russia is very much the junior partner in this relationship.” And yet that skepticism fails to reckon with an important and grim reality: China and Russia are more firmly aligned now than at any time since the 1950s.
The tightening of this alignment between Russia and China is one of the most important geopolitical outcomes of Putin’s war against Ukraine. The conscious efforts of Xi and Putin drive much of this reorientation, but it is also the byproduct of the deepening schism between the West and both countries. Western officials cannot wish this axis away, hoping in vain that the Kremlin bridles at its vassalage to Zhongnanhai or making futile attempts to drive a wedge between the two powers. Instead, the West should be prepared for an extended period of simultaneous confrontation with two immense nuclear-armed powers.
In a joint statement issued on February 4, 2022, Putin and Xi described ties between their two countries as a “partnership without limits.” That phrase won a lot of attention in the West, especially after Putin invaded Ukraine just 20 days later. Yet the deepening partnership was not born in February 2022. Following the bitter estrangement of the Sino-Soviet split that spanned the 1960s to the 1980s, China and Russia have become closer for several pragmatic reasons. Both sides wanted to make the territorial conflict between them a thing of the past, and by 2006, their 2,615-mile border had finally been fully delimited. Economic complementarity also drove them together: Russia had an abundance of natural resources but needed technology and money, while China needed natural resources and had money to spare and technology to share. And as Russia grew increasingly authoritarian with Putin in charge since 2000, Beijing and Moscow teamed up at the UN Security Council, using their power as permanent members to push back against many of the positions and norms advocated by Western countries, including the use of sanctions against authoritarian regimes and U.S.-led pressure campaigns in regional hot spots such as Syria.
China and Russia have also long shared a distrust of the United States, seeing Washington as an ideology-driven global hegemon that wants to prevent Beijing and Moscow from taking their rightful places in leading the world order and, even worse, that aims to topple their regimes. The ideological and political compatibility between China’s party-state and an increasingly authoritarian Russia has also grown. Leaders in Beijing and Moscow also refrained from criticizing the other’s record of repression at home and treatment of national minorities—subjects routinely brought up by Western counterparts.
After the breakdown of Russian relations with the United States following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Kremlin pivoted to the East to offset the effect of Western economic sanctions and make the Russian economy more resilient to Western pressure. Russia, whose defense industry survived the lean 1990s largely by selling arms to China, stepped up its exports of more sophisticated weaponry to its southern neighbor, such as S-400 surface-to-air missiles and Su-35 fighter jets, and invested in expanding pipelines, railroads, ports, and cross-border bridges that bring Russian natural resources to the Chinese market and Chinese imports to Russia.
As a result, the share of bilateral trade between the countries in Russia’s overall trade jumped from ten percent before the annexation of Crimea to 18 percent before Putin’s full-scale onslaught against Ukraine in 2022. The EU remained a more important partner for Russia, however, accounting for 38 percent of the country’s trade, as well as being the country’s largest investor and technology provider and a key destination for oil and gas exports. As for China, Russia accounted for only 2.5 percent of its trade in 2022, barely scraping into the ranks of its top 10 trading partners. China has counted its commercial, financial, and technological ties to the United States and Europe as far more important for the dynamism of the Chinese economy than its equivalent ties to Russia.
This helps to explain why, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—which by many accounts Beijing had not expected—China tried to sit on the fence. It maintained ties with Russia, seized the opportunity to buy cheap Russian oil (as did other fence sitters, including India), and did not directly criticize Russian aggression. At the same time, it refrained from supplying Moscow lethal aid except for occasional small shipments of gunpowder and other war-related materials, formally supported Ukrainian territorial integrity, and did not engage in gross violations of Western sanctions—although several Chinese companies were put under U.S. and EU sanctions in early 2024 for shipping banned goods to Russia.
Despite Beijing’s initially cautious approach, most available data points to a much more robust relationship between China and Russia developing in the two years since the invasion. In 2022, bilateral trade grew by 36 percent to $190 billion. In 2023, it grew to $240 billion, surpassing the $200 billion mark in November, a goal that Xi and Putin initially intended to reach in 2025. China has imported energy commodities worth $129 billion—mostly oil, pipeline gas, liquefied natural gas, and coal—that account for 73 percent of Russian exports to China, as well as metals, agricultural products, and wood. At the same time, China has exported to Russia goods worth $111 billion, dominated by industrial equipment (around 23 percent of exports), cars (20 percent), and consumer electronics (15 percent).
Western export controls and the increased focus of Western capitals on the enforcement of sanctions have meant that Russia has no other long-term option than to shift to importing Chinese-manufactured industrial and consumer goods. As a result, sales of Chinese industrial equipment jumped by 54 percent in 2023 compared with the previous year, and sales of Chinese cars........